or “why the Blogmistress does not apply every possible tag to blog posts”, or if I was to get all “awesome” I’d title this “The Skinny on WordPress Tags” perhaps – but I digress already.

After being gently admonished recently for not using tags prolifically for SEO purposes, I thought it time to outline just what to do with Tags.

It can be confusing to know just what to do with Tags in your WordPress blog posts. We have Categories so why do we need Tags?

And of course there are dozens of differing points of view on this – some “experts” insisting that tags are vital for SEO, and some, more sensibly (in my opinion), considering the wider strategy and user experience (which is what they are there for).

WordPress included the option of tagging your blog posts to offer another level of categorisation, sub-categories if you like, for your blog posts. Posts with similar tags can then be linked together, displayed together much in the same way as categories are, but more specific.

Before anything else, consider how using tags can be helpful for your visitors – never mind the search engines, focus on people. From their point of view Tags may be helpful in finding blog posts around a particular topic, within a Category. And of course by including that tag, it does offer a route that the search engines can follow in order to offer relevant results for their searchers.

Be careful not to overdo it. I suggest keeping tags to a minimum – too many and you not only dilute your blog post some, but you also add to the work your blog has to do to keep up with it all – and that can slow your website/blog down, something you do not want. Any SEO benefit could be wiped out by such, I suggest; it makes a difference.

So – make use of your Tags but keep them useful, focused and relevant.

Just looking at the snapshot of ours I can see a few that really are not going to be helpful for anyone, so will pop in and edit those. That can be a useful thing to do now and again, when you have a few dozen posts under your belt – take a look at your tag cloud and see if it is likely to help or hinder your visitors. I’ll be adding the tag cloud again when it is more relevant!

Following on from the earlier WordPress SEO post, I thought you might appreciate the following video:

In the summer of 2009, Matt Cutts, who heads up the Web spam team at Google (so he’s someone to take notice of), shared his take on how useful WordPress can be for your SEO, and thus your Internet marketing…

Well in this post we start using your best keywords (and if you want to chat about yours, pop an email over to me at hello@blogmistress.com):

Your blog’s title is one place that should ideally include your keywords – if that works for your blog or website – it won’t for some and will partly depend on the theme’s design, so don’t worry if you can’t work in your keywords here. You set your Blog Title in Settings, General. And while you’re there, see if you can include your keywords in the Tagline too.

Next go to Settings, Permalinks where you can have your page and post page names to something useful. The Permalinks are simply the permanent link address for a page. Set your Permalinks to a Custom Structure of /%postname%/ – what this does is take the title of your blog post or page and use it to name the link. For instance, this blog post’s link is http://www.blogmistress.com/wordpress-and-seo-part-1/

Now to install one of the most powerful plugins for your Internet marketing SEO – the All-in-One SEO plugin. Install this (go to Plugins, Add New and search for this then install) and then you can set the basics to best suit your SEO at Settings, All in One SEO – enter a Home Title that includes your best keyword(s) – this is one of your most powerful places to include your keywords – and add a Home Description – this is the bit that shows up in a search under your page’s title, so here you want to include something that will encourage your potential visitors to click to your website/blog, as well as your keywords. And as for the rest of the settings, it’s likely that the defaults provided will work well for you – we’ll explore this plug-in in more detail soon.

That will do for now – your next actions will follow later in the week. If you want to know more about any of this, either comment below, or send an email to hello@blogmistress.com or you may be able to grab me on Skype – find barbarasaul and happy to chat if I’m about.

If only we could know just what our potential customers are searching for? The phrases they mostly use…

If you are one of the people that has not used the Google Keyword Tool to play with research your keywords yet, today is your lucky day! You will have so much fun with this, so schedule some proper time to have a play… And if you are familiar with the tool but not worked with it for a while, do the same – allocate some time to review just how people are searching.

What this process will do is arm you with keywords that you can use through your blog and website, keywords based on real search data from Google. Now there are subscription services, such as Wordtracker, that offer you ways to find your best keywords, but to be honest, for most of us, the Google tool will provide ample information.

Before you get to the tool itself, you will want to have a few base keyword phrases to work from. So for the blogmistress, for instance, I’ve chosen “wordpress help” and “wordpress support” as two of the keywords.

In the top box, enter your base keyword phrases, each phrase on a new line. Then enter the characters shown to you in the picture, and Get Keyword Ideas.

This will then bring up two lists, one under the other. The first, top list offers the immediate keyword suggestions. Then below this you are offered a further list of additional related keyword suggestions.

The information provided includes the local search volume in the previous full month, and the global monthly search volume for that same month. I find this useful, being based in the UK and with most of my business carried out with UK businesses. But it’s useful to have an eye on the global volumes too – they may suggest an approaching trend.

You can download each list into a spreadsheet; I certainly find this useful, combining the two lists into one. Then from this you can consider the best keywords – i.e. those that people search for – for your site and blog. Of course you also want to take into account the level of competition for those keywords. This may be something worth chatting through and we’ll set up some online chats on this, or you can ask us your specific questions and/or concerns – twice a week we will focus on your specific issues within a blog post – so if that’s useful for you, just email me at hello@blogmistress.com and we’ll schedule you!

Have a good play with the Google Keyword tool – not only can this highlight your main keywords, but also blog post topics and titles – we’ll explore that in more detail very soon.

I usually download both lists then combine them into one spreadsheet to work with immediately and in the next few weeks.

Then be sure to re-visit those keywords regularly, and also try out others that you think people might use – sometimes you’ll be way off the mark, but will be provided with the keywords people are using.

Go – have fun, but don’t spend more time on this than you should! And if you’re at all unsure, just shout…

With so much conflicting advice thrust upon us, it’s no wonder that many of you are really not sure whether your blog should be an integral part of your website, or totally separate with its own domain.

We are often asked which is better for SEO and getting a good Google ranking – for a blog to be part of the website, or something quite separate. And to this the answer is always that your website and blog must be written with your visitors, be they potential clients, members, or whatever, in mind. What is going to be most appealing to them and encourage them to take the action you want them to take? Successful Internet marketing has this at its core.

So to answer this particular question – it depends! What makes the most sense? Is the blog highly relevant and directly linked to your website? Does it make sense for it to be within your website? If so, then that is where it should be. If instead it makes more sense for your blog to be on its own domain name, then that is what you should do.

There are many considerations and it’s tempting to write an essay on this. But I’ll try to keep it succinct.

A common misconception is that having links from a separate blog to your website will be most useful for a higher listing on Google. Well that is not true.

If you want to give your SEO a boost you’re better off having your blog within your website and concentrating on attracting some genuinely quality links to it – those individual links are regarded more highly than having lots of links from one place. And having a blog with fresh, relevant content is going to appeal to your visitors, and, as it happens, to the search engines too.

In nutshell terms, Google places a value on each link from a website. The first link from a good website or blog to another is worth, let’s say, 1, and then any further links go down in value because your site has already been given the recommendation of that 1 point. So – if you instead have 10 links from different websites or blogs, that is of a higher value as far as Google, etc are concerned. Mark White has explained it very well in his blog post here – with some excellent graphics that make it very easy to understand. Meanwhile, your active blog, full of highly relevant content is going to appeal – to visitors and, yes, to the search engines – they will take note and reward you justly.

So – the best thing you can do is to focus on your intended visitors – offer them what they want to see – give them fresh, relevant content (and a blog is perfect for this) and you will reap the rewards.

The issue of relevancy and how to understand that we’ll cover next week…